Even the most casual news consumers are recurrently confronted with a perplexing mathematics and metaphysics of risk. In the United States, for instance, the Republican defeat at the 2006 midterm elections immediately generated proposals for partial or complete military retraction from Iraq, but “staying the course,” pulling out, or any intermediate hypothetical action raised questions concerning risk and responsibility: Do Iraq’s apparently intractable conflicts justify putting more American soldiers in harm’s way? Is Iraq today in a “civil war,” or is it being attacked by the same foreign body as the United States (al-Qaeda)? Will Iraqis be left to struggle among themselves?

In a more subtle but ultimately no less brutal vein, is Chinese “respect” for Sudanese national sovereignty — and its reliance on a dollar (or yuan) diplomacy to secure access to oil — a quiet form of complicity with the genocide in Darfur? At what point is it possible for great powers such as the United States, Europe, and China to disinvest from partisan identification with “local” conflict and to stand by as reputedly neutral observers?

These kinds of questions raise passions in publics and counterpublics the world over. At the same time, other equally troubling dilemmas plague the “domestic front”: What are the responsibilities of corporations to their workers in the current economic environment? What is the responsibility of a government in assuring the security of its people? Is there an ideal balance between social security and personal responsibility? When is a national or federal government justified in taking a spectator’s role in violent but apparently “local” conflicts (drug wars, local electoral conflict, or massive failures of urban policing)? When, why, and how do governments and corporations choose to “outsource” insecurity?

The complex calculus of risk is not just a concern of today’s Church of the Latter-Day Metternichs; it is, rather, a geometry that calibrates our intimate decisions. Our most prized feelings — love, hope, compassion — are moored in today’s chronic and systemic insecurities. What is the connection between the strategic calculation of risk and the existential commitments of the people? In the sphere of the everyday, how do economies of affect take shape within the insecurity of the general economy?

This issue of Public Culture brings together independently submitted essays that reflect critically on today’s moral economy. The editorial pieces by David Shulman on Israel-Palestine, by Vicente Rafael on war and translation, and by Éric Fassin on the Pope and Islam nicely set forth some of the stakes of the issue’s three principal sections. Two of these sections, titled “Social Life of Risk” and “Biding Time, Binding Space,” offer reflections on the history, topography, systemic logic, and sentimental economy of insecurity. The remarkable collection of papers by Andrew Lakoff, Lauren Berlant, Jason Pine, Arthur Mason, and Joshua Comaroff has a curious wholeness, despite differences in style, in subject, and in perspective. In all cases, risk and coping emerge as systemic features, but they are also situated in time and space, and they take shape in constant tension with communities of experience. The essays of these two sections offer both a substantial education on insecurity in the general economy and a kind of testimony of a common cause, in the literal sense.

The third set of full-length essays in this volume is presented as a section on translation, mimesis, and transgression, a theme that is introduced by Vicente Rafael in his doxa piece on war and translation but that is developed in different directions by Rashmi Sadana — who offers an elegant exploration of the politics of language publics in India — and by Scott Herring, whose essay on artist Keith Haring is also an exploration of urban “clone culture” of the 1980s and, through it, of mimesis and difference in contemporary urban experience. These two texts reflect light back on Mark Jackson’s arresting photographic encounter with a feminine sublime in Calcutta.

Finally, Paul Kockelman has refreshed this journal’s commitment to the exploration of key words with his essay “Enclosure and Disclosure,” two concepts most pertinent to the analysis of boundaries, and the risks involved in crossing and recrossing them, at the heart of several contributions to this issue.